Home Video Reviews

Director Frank Borzage was a master at movie romances. He made a number of sweet-tough
Depression-era fables (like Man's Castle), but excelled with bittersweet fairy
tales: 7th Heaven, Street Angel, History is Made at Night. The 1932 adaptation of
Ernest Hemingway's popular WW1 novel A Farewell to Arms applies Borzage's
considerable talents to an anti-war tragedy perfectly poised for Depression audiences.

A scandal from its 1929 debut, Hemingway's book was also recognized as good literature. It
was written from his own experiences as an ambulance driver for Italy in WW1. American
adventurer-volunteer Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper) risks his life retrieving wounded
soldiers from the front; by night he and his drinking pal Dr. Major Rinaldi (Adolphe
Menjou) visit the local cat houses. Henry meets American nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen
Hayes), whose hospital unit enforces stringent rules. A nurse becomes pregnant and is sent
home in disgrace. The head nurses discourage contact with officers, and Catherine's friend
Helen "Fergie" Ferguson (Mary Phillips) disapproves of the relationship. Henry and
Catherine fall fast in love anyway, in a relationship accelerated by the dangers of
wartime. When Henry is wounded, they spend even more time together. Catherine becomes
pregnant and leaves for neutral Switzerland, informing Henry by letter. Henry goes AWOL to
find her, but his efforts are stymied when the meddling Major Rinaldi intercepts their love
letters. If Henry's own Italian comrades capture him, he'll be shot.

The trauma of the War to End All Wars lends Borzage's A Farewell to Arms a
fatalistic tone. The lovers' passionate affair diverts them from their duties. In addition
to those pressures, there's constant condemnation from Fergie, who thinks Catherine is yet
another nurse fallen victim to a worthless soldier. The cavalier Rinaldi takes it upon
himself to interfere with Henry's love life. Interestingly, both friends would seem to be
butting in for personal reasons. Rinaldi needs a drinking buddy, while Fergie's affection
for Catherine verges on worship.

Borzage shows us a world warped by war, where the standard proprieties no longer apply. The
makeshift hospitals are crowded with the suffering wounded, and the ambulance drivers
perform their duties as if each day could be their last. Dinners are interrupted by
bombings. Catherine meets the drunken Henry when she trips over him running for cover. He
presses his affections almost immediately. Back in the states, he claims, he'd be courting
her strictly by the rules. Catherine has already lost a sweetheart to the war, and says in
no uncertain terms that she wishes she'd broken the rules. "They blew him to bits. If I had
it to do over again I'd marry him -- or anything." Their brief romance involves cruel
separations and an unexpected pregnancy, desertion from duty and an ill-fated finish in
Switzerland. Henry and Catherine end up as modern echoes of classic star-crossed lovers.
The realism of earlier scenes (with some rather convincing miniature battlefields) gives
way to stylized montages of war frenzy, and ends on a deliriously romantic note,
accompanied by the music of Wagner.

A Farewell to Arms is often cited in studies of Pre-code productions, not because
its content shocked the nation but because it points up the problems of a Production Code
office that sought to determine the movie content at the script stage. Hemingway's book was
so widely popular that neither audiences nor the studios would tolerate changes to its
storyline. Besides breaking basic code tenets (illicit sex and a pregnancy out of wedlock)
the film showed a soldier abandoning his duty and a nurse openly having an affair with her
patient. Before the 1934 enforcement of the code, the studios often ganged together to vote
each other a 'pass' on films in censor trouble. The code authorities held up
Farewell until the producer made various changes, like putting more emphasis on the
disapproval of Catherine's friend Fergie. But Fergie never informs on Catherine, and she
eventually expresses sympathy for her friend's plight. The Code censors quickly caught on
to this dodge, and let it be known that the studios couldn't get away with forbidden
content simply by writing in a character that disapproves of what's going on.

Church authorities (a dominant force in the Code office) objected to the film's "fake
marriage" scene. A sympathetic priest (Jack La Rue) says a prayer for the couple that
resembles a wedding ceremony ... sort of, but not really. The bluenoses were incensed that
audiences might assume that the marriage was legitimate. Since the Code wasn't being fully
enforced, this detail was allowed to slide by, as were the soldiers' visits to obvious
brothels. The most controversial aspect was the virtuous Catherine's rejection of society's
rules. It wasn't enough for the censors that she and Lt. Henry are denied happiness.
Catherine is unrepentant in her defiance of the sexual norm. That's exactly the sort of
sentiment that makes a censor's blood run cold -- let young women think like that, and the
gates of Hell might open up.

Some pre-production script changes came from political-economic necessity. Ernest
Hemingway's novel expressed nothing but contempt for the Italian Army. The battles are all
fiascos. After a humiliating defeat, the Italians execute random officers as "traitors",
just to save face. The film's producers learned early on that Mussolini's Italy would bar
distribution of the film if that content remained. All references to official incompetence
were removed, and after a retreat or two the show ends in a glorious victory. This
alteration apparently irked Ernest Hemingway to no end, even when Borzage mocks the victory
by using pealing church bells as an ironic counterpoint to a tragedy. The final images of
A Farewell to Arms mix over-the-top romanticism with a powerful anti-war message.

The books also tell us that United Artists panicked after a couple of distributor previews,
and prepared an alternate version of A Farewell to Arms with a happy ending. They
don't say how many theaters opted to use it in place of the ending closer to Hemingway's
book.

Gary Cooper was a big star in 1932 but the even more famous Helen Hayes receives top
billing for her powerful performance. In keeping with the era's rules of good taste, when
Catherine is heavy with child, she purposely stays behind objects to avoid showing her
abdomen. Premiered as a prestige attraction, Farewell was nominated for Best Picture
and Best Art Direction, and took home Oscars for Cinematography and Sound. Great
filmmaking sometimes happens when studios think they're working with important material.

Kino Classics' Blu-ray of A Farewell to Arms is an improvement on previous Public Domain
releases of this early sound drama. The source is a 35mm nitrate print belonging to the
Selznick estate, preserved by the George Eastman House. The print is not without scratches
here and there, but overall it's a beauty - sharp, stable, with an excellent range of
contrast. This release's biggest edge over earlier copies is its award-winning soundtrack,
which is rich and full. The superior audio mix makes its biggest impact in the emotional
climax.

by Glenn Erickson
It's no secret that Ernest Hemingway could be an ornery cuss when he wanted
to, and he had little use for people who made their living in the film industry. So it's hardly
a shock that he openly despised Frank Borzage's entertaining but bowdlerized
version of his war novel, A Farewell to Arms. It is
surprising, though, that he developed a longtime allegiance to the film's
broad-shouldered star, Gary Cooper. Hemingway was known for discarding, or,
worse yet, alienating even his closest friends. But he and Cooper became
buddies a few years after A Farewell to Arms (1932) was released, and they
stayed that way for nearly 20 years.

Cooper stars as Lt. Frederick Henry, a World War I officer whose world is
turned upside down when he falls for a British nurse named Catherine Barkley
(Helen Hayes.) Henry and Catherine are made for each other, but Henry's
friend, Major Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou) grows jealous of them, and has Helen
transferred to Milan. Then, as luck would
have it, Henry is wounded and ends up in the very hospital where Catherine
works. Henry quickly heals, and is sent back into battle, but not before
Catherine is carrying their love child. Though Catherine tries to contact
Henry to tell him the news, she can't reach him due to even more treacherous
maneuvers by Rinaldi.

Eventually, there's a happy or ambiguous finale, depending on which print of
the film you see. Paramount actually made both endings available to theater
owners, telling them to use the one that they thought would work best for
their particular audience. Hemingway was less than enchanted with the idea
of projectionists randomly deciding how his hard-hitting story should end,
and he was livid over several other instances in which the screenplay
softened his hard-hitting vision. But the $24,000 he received for A
Farewell to Arms' film rights encouraged him to sell several more
properties to Hollywood in the ensuing years.

The movie's love scenes, by the way, were no problem at all for Hayes.
Although she was happily married at the time, she harbored an intense crush
on Cooper. She freely admitted as much in her autobiography, when, among
other Cooper-related confessions, she wrote: "My leading man was Gary
Cooper, and like half the women in the world, I was, in the words of the
Noel Coward song, "Mad about the boy."

The Image Entertainment DVD of A Farewell to Arms is probably the best version currently available of this public domain title - which is to say, it has some problems but it's also the complete cut of the film. The image quality is variable with some sections of the film much sharper than others but you'll need to monitor the volume closely - it is very low during dialogue scenes though the music score is often mixed very loud. There are also no extras on the DVD.